


the hurt built in

by reogulus



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Face-Sitting, M/M, Masturbation, Past Infidelity, Post-Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:28:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23522311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reogulus/pseuds/reogulus
Summary: Stewy smiles. “Ex-wife of the year right here. You’re so concerned about him you didn’t even ask what’s in it for you first.” He’s fluent in the language of Roys, the tongue of evading biting questions with even more biting insults; learned it better than she ever did, despite her carrying her married name for as long as she has.
Relationships: Stewy Hosseini/Kendall Roy, Stewy Hosseini/Kendall Roy/Rava Roy, Stewy Hosseini/Rava Roy
Comments: 4
Kudos: 49





	the hurt built in

Who will master this love? Love might be the wrong word.

Let's admit, without apology, what we do to each other.

_DETAIL OF THE FIRE, RICHARD SIKEN_

Stewy sends her a bouquet first, red roses and pink lilies, the fragrance almost makes Rava feel sick. Sophie loves it, though, so she plucks out a few for her daughter to play with, before plopping the bouquet into a vase. It came with a card, with a time, a day and an address. It’s less than two days away; Rava keys it into her calendar anyway. _It’s important to keep up with a routine._

She repeats to herself what her counselor says, echoed by the child behaviour psychologist paid from the child support account. Meeting with Stewy Hosseini is not part of anything that makes sense—should make sense—in her life, now.

Kendall has been a talking head on every news channel since that day. The first time she heard it, Rava had to steady her coffee mug with both hands. The calmness of Kendall’s voice projecting from her living room, _the truth is_. He kept talking, and talking, and then the reporters were whipped into a frenzy. She felt dizzy, and then numb. Snapped back into focus only when Iverson wandered downstairs and pointed at the TV, making a quizzical noise towards her. She shut off the TV before ushering him out of the living room.

 _What now?_ All the headlines are asking. The stock market can’t seem to make up its mind yet. Her divorce lawyer texts her, _now’s your chance, it’s now or never_ , she swipes the notification out of sight as soon as she’s read it.

What has he done to himself?

Rava used to ask herself this when she noticed the trails Kendall left behind, when she first caught suspicions about his addiction. She didn’t have the answer and didn’t have anyone to ask, either. Now there’s this invitation from Stewy. They haven’t talked one-on-one since college. She doesn’t even have his phone number.

It might be nice to have someone to ask, someone who knows his ways, just as well as she does or maybe even better. It’s just that Rava hasn’t made up her mind about whether she wants to hear Stewy’s answers.

Back at Harvard, Rava met Stewy first, or, Stewy met Rava first. It’s the same point but the optics are different, maybe, depending on how you say it. Kendall came into the picture at a Lampoon house party, to celebrate some big distribution gamechanger he pulled off for the publication, came over when he saw the two of them talking on a couch. After that night, Stewy became exceedingly polite around her, all but distant. She couldn’t figure out what it was about, so she let it go. She was very good at letting things go, as a young woman in her twenties who cared too much about how she’d come across to people, to men. Come to think of it now, if she was any less good at it, she might not have ended up married to Kendall Roy, into the business of saying things differently for optics.

“Rava,” Stewy calls out, walking up from behind her seat. “Ten minutes early, as always.”

They shake hands across the table; the angle somewhat awkward, but she doesn’t get up. He sits down and asks about her kids, her life, things inconsequential to his agenda that brought her here. Rava smiles and replies in turn, in her best Roy-dinner-party tone and choice of words. They go on until the waiter comes over with the wine list; Stewy chooses without further questions or tasting, the way of the bon vivant. He too stays true to his public role, mirroring her in kind.

“So,” he stretches his arms, putting his hands on the tablecloth. She knows the main course is coming before the drinks or the appetizers. She feels his gaze upon her and looks up to meet his eyes, keeping up her smile.

“I was thinking there’s an angle for a team-up between us.”

She cocks her head. “What do you think I can offer you?”

“I need something to get Kendall to come to the table,” he pauses. “Think of me as a salvor, Rava, I take the sunken ships and find a new life for their useful parts. I was doing that for Waystar, and we were so close—so close to bagging it, winning the shareholder votes. But I can’t save shit if Kendall keeps trying to blow it up.”

There’s an urgency to Stewy’s voice, irritation rising in his eyes. Rava has never seen him lose his temper, especially not when he’s trying to make a deal. She takes a sip from her water glass, with appreciation of something new about him coming to the fore. She takes long enough to make sure he feels the wait.

“What do you think I can offer you?” Rava sets down the glass and asks again. She’s not smiling anymore.

“We’ve been friends for years. We’re old friends.”

Kendall always prefaced his answer with some version of this acknowledgement of history, whenever Stewy came up in conversation between them. He said it more often towards the end of their marriage, as their exchanges became increasingly loaded and strained. Everyone paid to help Kendall become clean and stay clean had almost succeeded in getting him to cut off his contacts with known histories of substance use, but for Stewy. The one person who always knew to make himself too available, too easy for Kendall to find and lean on in all the wrong ways.

“He’s an old friend. Useful industry contacts. You know the cash flow problems we’ve been having with all the print divisions. I think he could be an escape hatch for our business, you know, if things come down to it.” This was how Kendall justified it to himself, to her, and it proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their marriage travelled a similar path at the same time, in parallel; stalled at an impasse, a foregone conclusion. She moved her things to the guest bedroom after looking up state laws about marriage separation under the same roof. Kendall came home to the new reality she constructed while he was gone during the day; he said nothing. Rava’s side of the bed remained as empty as she’d left it.

“You haven’t signed the divorce settlement, have you?” The answer is, of course she hasn’t, and of course Stewy knows that already.

“I don’t think you will get his attention with the divorce, Stewy,” she replies.

There was an airtight incommunicado that lasted about ten days after Shiv’s wedding, where the world suddenly had to get a hold of Kendall, where all of them were met with the apologetic, unyielding stonewall auto-reply from Jess. At the time Rava thought it was directed at her specifically, punishment for what she said and did at the wedding, for picking a piece of lint off his suit jacket; so much for keeping the mess between their lawyers.

As it turned out, not only was Rava not targeted, she was sidelined. Kendall didn’t even try to push back on the house, their matrimonial home of fifteen years, got his things out and into a penthouse as soon as he flew back to New York. He stopped picking up the kids for visitation, sending Jess to arrange an itinerary only when Sophie’s birthday was coming up and she called to remind him, a week prior to. More than ambivalent, he’d become entirely inert about it: the divorce and the family that existed before, a singular entity.

“I know he’s been playing hot-and-cold with, well, just about anything these days, but…” Stewy leans forward, and the more he wants her to play along the more Rava wants to check the time on her phone. “There’s an impact on the divorce, there’s a legal angle here. The shit Kendall has been doing to his family assets. It endangers his assets in a way that materially affects his ability to provide, right? If not alimony, then definitely child support.”

“I’ll think about it,” Rava calibrates her tone about halfway between politeness and indifference. “So what are you gonna do with him if I follow your suggestion?”

Stewy smiles. “Ex-wife of the year right here. You’re so concerned about him you didn’t even ask what’s in it for you first.” He’s fluent in the language of Roys, the tongue of evading biting questions with even more biting insults; learned it better than she ever did, despite her carrying her married name for as long as she has.

The waiter comes back to pour the wine for them. Rava imagines throwing her glass at Stewy’s face, on his linen blazer and white t-shirt; imagines shards of glass drawing blood. She smiles back.

“Have you been seeing anyone?” Later, Stewy asks her over dessert. Of everything he’s asked today, this one comes with the most intent. “Come on. Don’t plead the fifth on me.”

But she doesn’t need to plead anything and she doesn’t need to humour him. “Back at Harvard—you guys made bets about me, didn’t you? You didn’t invite me to that Lampoon party just to be nice.”

“There were bets, yes,” Stewy re-adjusts the napkin in his lap. “But, you know, it was the same with everything that Ken and I did together, ever since we were kids. Nothing is worth doing if there aren’t stakes added to it. That birdwatching shit his dad wanted him to take up with Roman, I went with him for a couple years after Roman got sent to military school. Do what fits the script and feed him the truth in small doses after. We’re both better off for it.”

Rava has to laugh. It just seems so obvious, spelled out like this, the machismo roughshod of it all. Always easier performed than confronted.

“Sure,” she mimics his tone, “those were simpler times.”

You can’t observe a black hole directly, but you can infer its existence from its effect on the surrounding objects.

Rava feels this by intuition, or by inference, either way: the incommunicado that follows this press conference is different from the one that followed the Iceland broadcast. It’s not a retreat when you bide your time only to sharpen your blade. She and Stewy know this side of Kendall, driven by manic fixation, a clairvoyant above all justification, a ticking time bomb.

Here’s where Stewy overestimates himself, or underestimates Rava, or both; she had the foresight to hire a very good lawyer, and early in the risk assessment consultation they’d outlined this option to her. The endangerment of the best interests of the children, Kendall’s erratic behaviour jeopardizing the Waystar share price, the fact that Logan refused to revise the structure of his children’s inheritance to anything but 100% shares. Full custody is a carte blanche if used properly, disclosure of assets and income, everything. Prioritize the best interests of the children and maintain the standard of living they enjoyed prior to divorce, the law says this much. Stewy wants information and information is leverage; it’s an open secret at this point that Waystar is desperate to take itself private, but everyone is biding their time now, waiting with bated breath to see what truly shakes loose post-patricide broadcasted live.

What’s in it for her, then?

Rava doesn’t need to do anything for the sole purpose of hurting Kendall. She never had to, not since she met him, not since she said yes to that first date. The hurt was built in from day one, it captivated her and held her captive, long enough to commit her to the institution of marriage. That part is easy to take stock; it’s just history.

But her children; the two of them who will struggle for the rest of their lives to wear their last name, they will never fully know what to do with it, and she can only watch it happen from behind a one-way mirror. She knows the cruelest names people will call them, have already called them; there’s no opting out of it, the way Sophie’s classmates have started giving her those looks, it’s the most intuitive part of the social code. Rava can’t help her keep it out by privating her Instagram any more than she can put her in an inflatable bubble to keep out germs.

Still, money provides a certain kind of insulation that goes from nice-to-have to absolutely vital, when the girl is adopted and the boy is retarded; as their mother, being politically correct about anything on this subject is a moot point. There is no use trying to extract it out of her children, the hurt that’s built in. She knows well enough to keep it in, the worst bits that come with this territory, and she prays she can hold on until her children are old enough to understand. She prays that if she can keep this up long enough, her children will never have to understand. And to do that, she needs money. She needs a lot of it, over a long, long time.

At the end of lunch Stewy gives Rava his card, black-and-white without a business number, only personal. It’s not hard to imagine other scenes in which he hands them out, where the sun doesn’t shine. He watches her tuck the card into her purse as he signs the check. It’s really been too long since their orbits intersected like this; they can’t be too careful around each other, not now.

She checks her phone for time, finally. She thumbs through her calendar, feeling Stewy’s gaze trained on her arm, her neck.

Rava makes a decision in that split second, she does the math quickly in her head, before she can talk herself out of it. She exits the app and locks her screen dark again, raising her head to meet Stewy’s eyes. It’s three in the afternoon and the sunlight has mellowed where they are sitting, catching a glint of olive in his brown eyes. It’s pretty like that, she thinks, for the moment.

“Come on, aren’t you going to buy me a drink?” Rava pushes a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’ll need something stronger than wine before I tell you more about who I’m seeing.”

Stewy laughs as they leave the restaurant. The flourish with which he holds the door for her almost makes her skin crawl.

Kendall went completely opaque on her for three days after Rava moved to the guest room, coming home at 2am or later every night. On the third night, he knocked on her door; she was reading and had her light on.

She opened the door for him. His eyes were glassy, pupils still huge, and she didn’t even want to know what remained around his nostrils. They were both tired, barefoot, he in his stained shirt and slacks, she in her old pajamas. They were both spent before the main event even began, before his lawyers filed a proper response to her application. Candles tired of burning at both ends.

“There’s something you need to know,” he began.

She nodded in acknowledgement, said nothing. She wandered what she could possibly brace herself for, what could possibly qualify as a dramatic, sombre reveal after wiping her children’s iPad clean of streaks of coke.

He continued, “I fucked Stewy. No, I’ve _been_ fucking Stewy. It started before you and I got together,” Kendall leaned his right arm on the door frame, steadying himself. “When I was in Chicago, and California, and Shanghai…we didn’t really stop.”

Rava crossed her arms; she let the words hang in the air between them for a few beats.

“Uh-huh,” was all Rava said. She stood there, counting down the seconds until Kendall managed to straighten himself up, stumble away.

It is imperative for a woman in her position to understand monogamy is supposed to be an impressionist painting; it’s not meant to bear, or be understood upon, scrutiny. She knew this much even as a bride. As far as shock value was concerned, the whole thing really netted negative.

The only thing is, Rava wasn’t sure, at the time, if Kendall said it to hurt her, if he meant to apologize but was too fucked up to say it properly, if it was a cry for help, or if he simply reached a point of needing to confess. For a few months after that, she kept thinking back to it, turning over the possibilities in her head, drafting a timeline in her head. Sometimes, if she put herself as far away as possible from the memory of that night, she might almost swear it was a dream. She learns to convince herself that she doesn’t think about it much anymore.

At the bar, Rava may have managed to have a decent conversation with Stewy that steers clear of business, which includes marriage and divorce. Stewy may pull up his girlfriend’s portfolio to show Rava her latest work, Rava may tell him a few stories of getting hit on while dropping off the kids at school, one of whom is a reporter who wanted to get a comment about Kendall. They can even reminisce certain parts of their shared experiences at Harvard. And sure, all these things they share would be true.

But it’s all just the split-second simulation Rava runs in her head before she slips her foot out of her heel, before she lifts her leg and rests her calf on Stewy’s left thigh. She goes through all the motions without breaking eye contact with him. And then she starts with that rhetorical question, _aren’t you?_

Stewy leads her to a room that is either an apartment he owns or an Airbnb he’s booked for some alternative plan of debauchery. She leans back on the door as it hastily shuts behind her, their hands making quick work of the buttons and zippers on their clothes. There is a mercenary efficiency to all of this that switches her on, makes her come alive to it. When Stewy plants a trail of kisses behind her earlobe and down her neck, she thinks of her last sexual encounter with Kendall. The blatant lies he mumbled under his breath, both of them stumbling drunk. She couldn’t bother with even a pretense of reconciliation.

Rava lies on the bed, her skirt already hiked up above her hips. Stewy doesn’t rip her tights, slips them down past her knees, all gentle. Kisses her ankle as he removes her heels. At this point she kind of regrets not drinking more wine, but not enough to stop; the wetness already building between her legs.

“If we may have a moment of honesty before proceeding further,” Stewy stands up, shrugs off his blazer, comes hovering near her. Whatever he plans to ask her, she knows the question will come with a forecasted answer. “Is this what you fantasized about—before?”

She reaches up, tracing a finger down the contours of his trimmed beard. Rava wants to laugh, but her lips open with only a smile.

“I haven’t thought about it until Kendall told me. About you and him.”

A strangled noise comes out of him, as if a gasp of surprise, but most certainly one of arousal. Rava takes hold of v-neck of his undershirt, tears it wide open. She hears a louder moan from him.

Rava knows herself, with the detached cruelty inside her that she keeps hidden under her domestic duties, her image as a mostly-full-time mom. It is this cruelty that allows her to keep clear-eyed and focused, unraveling the business problems when Kendall got stuck between decisions, between management and board, between his family and his children. It is this cruelty that keeps her mostly intact after a marriage in the lion’s den, keeps her children shielded.

It is with this cruelty that she fists her hand in his dark hair, thicker and tougher than the texture of Kendall’s between her fingers. He’s licking into her eagerly, eager to perform, as if this can be construed as a race. She’s on top of him now, propping an arm against the headboard, pushing his head down into the pillow and grinding her hips down further, back and forth. When she’s pushed Stewy past the point of breathless, Rava rolls over to the side. She kicks off the skirt bunched up at her waist.

Rava looks over and sees his chest heaving. He’s still dressed from the waist down, the bulge looking especially prominent in those fitted jeans. His right hand is finally creeping over to touch himself now.

“Don’t,” she leans over to whisper in his ear, then bats his hand away to undo his belt and strip him swiftly. Squatting down again, facing away from the headboard this time, she parts herself open to drag her clit slowly across his lips; the prickling effect of his beard making her gasp. As his tongue hungrily searches for her, she takes his dick into her mouth. She keeps at it, with the thoroughness and patience of a long-suffering wife.

“Please,” Stewy croaks out, gasping for air as she finally lifts her ass from his face. She squeezes the base of his cock and palms over his sack; he’s right on the edge now, right where she wants him. She lines it up against her cunt, all glistening with wetness, and pushes him into herself.

Sometimes when Rava masturbates on nights alone, she lets her mind wander to what Kendall said to her that night. _I’ve_ been _fucking Stewy._ It’s the way he put emphasis on the second word, that always leaves her breathless as she presses down on her clit, drawing circles on it. It’s the feeling of surprise that gets her wet, every time, of knowing she shouldn’t have expected any better but somehow failing the blind spot check anyway. It’s the only time she allows herself to be angry, with no one to take it out on but herself. She drowns her thoughts in the buzz of the vibrator, her fingers moving rough and fast, in and out until she feels more wetness leaking out of her.

Stewy and Kendall as teenagers in the barely soundproof dorms with the creaky double beds, Stewy and Kendall coked up and high out of their minds on a private jet; Kendall not knowing what to do with the desperation and hunger foisted upon him by meaningless legacy so he takes it out on Stewy, fucking him senseless until his hole is raw and his voice nearly breaks from begging; Stewy coaxing Kendall into sucking his dick for the promise of finally proving that Logan has been wrong about him all along, keeping him nice and pliant and high out of his mind.

She runs through everything in her head. She turns them over and over again in her head, fleshes out the details as she cooks and cleans and shuttles the kids to their extracurriculars during the day. It fills her up like a reservoir. And she lets it pour out of her on nights like this, struggling to keep quiet the gasping orgasms, biting down the pillows to let them absorb the screams. She always comes with a vengeance.

Here’s the caveat about ending a marriage: the more money you have, the less likely that a divorce will actually serve as an ending. It’s a wound that you can stitch up just as much as you can rip open. Reaching settlement and re-opening settlement are two sides of the same coin, with a whole cottage industry of elite divorce lawyers billing their fees in between. Lady Caroline has been right about it, after her own fashion; you have to learn to amuse yourself with the thing that you know will probably tail you for the rest of your life, like how the terminally ill jokes about death.

Rava is learning, too. After her own fashion.

It doesn’t take long to fuck Stewy to completion. He’s still trying to catch his breath as Rava wipes his cum off her inner thigh. In hindsight, it all feels too easy.

Stewy watches her get dressed, adjust her necklace in front of the mirror, pick up her bag. His lips move but no sounds come out. Rava smiles over her shoulder as she opens the door to leave, waving goodbye at Stewy with the card he gave her between her middle and fore fingers. There’s nothing more to be said about the leverage given up so easily to her.

Rava steps out of the building lobby and into the sun. She checks the time again. With her sunglasses on, she turns onto the sidewalk. The card is crumpled and balled up in her fist. She tosses it into the first garbage can in her line of sight.

**Author's Note:**

> I should have been doing a million other things instead of churning out this fic over two days, but I feel compelled to write as much as I can possibly manage during the extraordinary times we are living in. I don't actually know anything about divorce laws in New York, but I know enough to build some half-truths on the subject.
> 
> Shoutout to [arbitrarily](http://archiveofourown.com/users/arbitrarily) for chatting with me about some Stewy/Kendall/Rava things! I did not expect myself to be able to cobble something together, but here we are. Anyways I love Rava and I hope the writers bring her back in season 3 to render this fic non-compliant with canon.


End file.
